Perform Remote Application Debugging with Gibraltar

We've been there. Your software works great inside your shop, but something went wrong for a customer. You need to find out what really happened and get that information to the folks that can figure out the problem and work on the solution. To get to the root of the issue, you need to figure out:

• How widespread is the problem?
• Is it a new issue or something you've seen before?
• How exactly was the computer configured where the problem happened?

The sooner you can answer these questions, with the least disruption to your customer the better. Gibraltar includes all of the pieces you need to make this happen:

• The Agent that functions like a black box, recording the characteristics of the computer running your software and monitoring the application as it runs.
• The Packager, built into the Agent and ready to send diagnostic data to you effortlessly from within your app.
• The Analyst, ready to make sense of thousands of sessions to find the patterns that define any problem.

Get The Data from There to Here Effortlessly

Built into the Agent are the tools needed to gather up all the session data and get it to you in the best way for your situation. With no code changes your users package up the data and send it to you with the Gibraltar Packaging Wizard. It will automatically pick the right sessions to send you to give you the whole picture without sending you sessions you've seen before.

Disconnected Computers?
Embedded Systems? No Problem!

Gibraltar is designed with isolated systems in mind - the Packager automatically scans for removable media like USB keys to write data to, ensures it's uniquely named and ready to be sent on where a network is available. This is ideal for systems that never connect to a network, like embedded systems, control platforms, and instrumentation.

Convenient, Compressed Data Format

All of the sessions selected on the remote computer for analysis are bundled together into a single package. Not only is every Gibraltar session compressed as its captured but additional binary compression makes packages even smaller and ensures they aren't corrupted along the way. The package also includes an index to make it easy to recognize at a glance which sessions are important and which ones you can ignore.

Get to Know the Problem Computers

The Gibraltar Agent records dozens of characteristics of each computer where your software runs, selected based on industry best practices for what can cause problems:

The best part is you can get all of this information without relying on the effort and accuracy of your customers. Perhaps the problem only affects Windows XP running in English localized for the United Kingdom. Or you only support Windows 2000 SP4 and newer, and the computer is running SP3. The faster you can find these miss-matches, the faster you'll have a satisfied customer.

What exact version was that?

No application is just one file. By the time your software is up and running its loaded various parts of the .NET runtime, perhaps some third party add-ons and your own assemblies. What exact version are they using? Is it coming from the Global Assembly Cache or not? What processor architecture was it built for? Is it a localized assembly? It's hard to get good answers to these questions from users.

Instead of asking your users to follow arcane instructions for getting properties from files and hope they get it exactly right, Gibraltar captures exactly what assemblies were loaded, where they came from, and when they loaded.

Perhaps they didn't get that last patch, or something else they installed updated a component you share. Have they updated their computer recently? No wild goose chases - just the real information on what they had when they ran the application.